After brief introductions, you will pick one of the four workshops that will run in parallel, before all coming back together to share noticings.

The Community Governed Organization (CGO): Mapping and Co-Learning Workshop

Communities have been governing themselves for centuries — but the fast-paced evolution of language, structures, and technologies risk fragmenting a practice that has a common lineage and logic underneath. But these practices and protocols are rarely shared across communities, and are often complicated by the rapid pace of technological change. This hands-on working session brings designers and practitioners of community governance together to map what's working, surface shared challenges, and contribute to a living resource for the field.

The session is built around a shared framework that a multi-stakeholder working group has been exploring and evolving for the past year together - the Community Governed Organization (CGO). A CGO is defined simply as any community aligned on a mission that has built participatory, democratized governance structures to self-govern and mobilize resources. It includes cooperatives, DAOs, collectives, associations, and alliances — but focuses on the common architecture underneath those forms, organized around four elements: Roles, Protocols, Tools, and Ceremonies.

Using this frame as a shared map, participants will work in small groups to document what patterns they’re currently using in their work - what's worked, what hasn't, and what they wish existed. The outputs feed directly into the CGO Toolkit being developed by the CGO working group — a practitioner-facing resource designed to help communities navigate governance transitions without having to start from zero, and a growing community of practice to learn, build, and adapt new frameworks that continue to support community governance of the new tools and technologies that are being built every day.

Madelynn Martiniere

Richard Ng

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Entanglement by Design

Most distributed communities fail not because their technology breaks, but because nothing holds them together. This Network Nations workshop introduces entanglement — the purposeful weaving of interdependencies across cultural, economic, legal, and structural layers — as a design practice, and gives participants tools to map and strengthen the resilience of their own projects.

Entanglement is what transforms a loose federation into something that can sustain obligations, weather shocks, and govern itself across distance.

Drawing on cooperative traditions, mutual aid networks, indigenous commons governance, and diasporic community structures — we work through the four layers of interdependence that produce durable political community, and apply them directly to participants' own projects.

Lovisa Björna

Felix Beer

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Anti-patterns of Exit to Community in Web3

A few years ago, Exit to Community (E2C) in Web3, i.e. transitioning ownership and governance rights to user communities via DAOs, was all the hype. The goal has always been to decentralize the governance of technologies. Today, we know that in some cases the transitions resulted in relatively stable and successful community organizations, whereas in other cases, small stakeholder groups and founders have resurfaced as holding outsized power. In this workshop we examine the anti-patterns of E2C in Web3. Specifically, we ask: what steps that Web3 organizations took during their Exit to Communities, seemed like a good idea at the time, but ultimately have led to counterproductive or even harmful outcomes?

A few years ago, Exit to Community (or Progressive Decentralization) became a key ambition of Web3: the idea that ownership and governance rights could be transferred from founders and investors to user communities through Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). At its core, the movement promised a more democratic and decentralized future for technology governance. Since then, however, the outcomes have been mixed. Some transitions produced resilient and effective community-led organizations (especially in DeFi). Others gradually reproduced familiar concentrations of power, with founders, core contributors, or small stakeholder groups regaining outsized influence over decision-making processes. Yet others failed to ever complete their transitions beyond distributing tokens, or failed due to a lack of structure supporting community governance.

This workshop examines the anti-patterns of decentralization in Web3 by looking critically at the governance choices made during these “Exit to Community” transitions. For this, we present 5 recipes of E2C, i.e. typical E2C strategies identified across the blockchain ecosystem. In groups, organized around these different recipes, we discuss the anti-pattern or ‘fake flavours’ that may emerge from each recipe.

Tara Merk

Primavera De Filippi

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Wins, Wreckage, and Wisdom: How Projects Survive (and Why They Don’t)

The DWeb community has no shortage of ambition, and plenty of hard earned wisdom around a variety of strategies for bringing decent infrastructure into the world. This participatory workshop is focused on surfacing the wins as well as the hard won lessons from our collective experiences, particularly regarding how projects and movements sustain ongoing efforts at helping create a more decent web and world.

Many of us have tried to build systems that support a more decent world. Some have had success. Fewer have managed to sustain those efforts. Others have experienced burn out or a dissipation of coherence and vitality over time. Come share your experiences and hear from others about what worked and what didn’t at various phases in our efforts to build a more decent web and world.

Matthew Schutte

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